The Cult of the U-Turn: Why Our Leaders Don’t Think Before They Leap

output-onlinetools2starmer-piy-psay-picsay

13 major policy U-Turns… why is critical thinking entirely missing from our leadership?

C.J. STRACHAN

Thirteen policy U-turns.

That’s the tally now being openly reported for the Starmer government, with the latest climb-down being a retreat from mandatory digital ID for work checks. The plan hasn’t been binned outright; it’s been quietly re-labelled “optional”, the political equivalent of telling your spouse you didn’t forget your anniversary, you merely “re-prioritised the calendar”. (Reuters)

And here’s the obvious question that polite society refuses to ask: how do you get to the point where major national policy is launched: again and again, only to be reversed, again and again, without anyone in the room stopping the train before it hits the buffer?

You can’t blame “events”. You can’t blame “the markets”. You can’t blame “complexity”. Some reversals are forced by reality; most are forced by basic questions that should have been asked on day one.

So why weren’t they asked?

The answer nobody in Westminster wants to hear

Because groupthink is now the dominant qualification for leadership: in politics, in the public sector, and in too many of our big institutions.

We have built teams by selecting for compliance and then acting surprised when we get incompetence.

This is how it works.

The person who “rocks the boat” gets labelled “negative”.
The person who asks “problematic questions” gets labelled “not a team player”.
The person who insists on risks, consequences, unintended effects, legal exposure, operational reality gets quietly side-lined.
And the person who nods along, smiles on cue, and repeats the current moral slogan gets promoted.

Over time, you don’t just lose a few awkward characters. You excise out the very trait leadership teams exist to provide: critical thinking.

So by the time policy reaches “launch”, the room is full of people who have learned one lesson: don’t be the one who raises doubts. And if someone does have competence, if they have hard-won experience and a genuine sense of consequence, they keep their head down, because questioning is treated as disloyalty.

That, in a sentence, is how you get serial U-turns.

The U-turns are not the disease. They’re the symptom.

Look at what the reporting is now describing as a run of reversals: digital ID policy being softened; welfare and benefit measures being watered down after internal rebellion; major shifts around inquiries and politically sensitive decisions; and so on. (Sky News)

You can argue about each individual policy. Fine.

But the pattern matters more than the policies. The pattern tells you the process is broken.

A healthy decision-making culture looks like this:

Someone proposes an idea.
The awkward people interrogate it.
The risks are surfaced early.
The edge cases are tested.
The lawyers do their job.
Operations tells you what will actually happen in the real world.
Comms is forced to confront public perception.
The proposal is improved or killed before it becomes national embarrassment.

A broken culture looks like this:

Someone proposes an idea.
Everyone signals virtue and loyalty.
The plan is announced with moral certainty.
Reality turns up.
The plan collapses.
Everyone pretends the plan was never quite the plan.
Repeat.

Labour under Starmer: a serious party, or a loyalty cult?

This is where we have to stop being naïve.

Labour used to be a broad church. It had internal conflict, sometimes rancid conflict, but it also had serious people who could disagree fiercely because they believed competence mattered. A cabinet table shouldn’t be a prayer circle.

But the Starmer project has increasingly behaved like a loyalty cult and loyalty-first systems don’t produce robust decisions. They produce safe decisions for the leader, not wise decisions for the country.

When a leader is surrounded by people chosen primarily for alignment, you don’t get honest challenge; you get a performance. You get “messaging”. You get career-preservation. You get the politics of not being noticed.

And then you get U-turn number thirteen. (Reuters)

The OODA Loop: why “observe and act” is how fools run organisations

There’s a useful model here, borrowed from military thinking: the OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act; developed by US Air Force strategist John Boyd in the 1970s. (Wikipedia)

Boyd’s point wasn’t “be fast”. It was: be fast and correct, by constantly updating your understanding of reality.

But in modern organisations, we’ve created a perverse parody of the OODA loop. We obsess over the first and last letters: Observe and Act, and we neglect the bit in the middle that makes decisions intelligent:

Orient: interpret what you’re seeing; put it in context; understand second-order effects; ask what you’re missing.
Decide: choose deliberately; test assumptions; weigh risks; define thresholds for reversal before you’re publicly committed.

When “observe” becomes emotional reaction (“Twitter is angry”, “the press is shouting”, “we must be seen to do something”), and “act” becomes performative policy (“zero tolerance”, “new guidance”, “taskforce”), you get the organisational equivalent of a startled horse: movement without direction.

And then everyone is shocked when the movement causes casualties. If you are wondering where this comes from, then spend 5 minutes looking at the stream of emotional reaction you see on social media, so emotive has society become that we are now seeing middle aged, educated adults, iterally destroying their lives because they are unable to consider the consequences of their conductat political protests in democracies where there is recourse to justice and policy can be changed through democratic engagement. No, their feelings are more important than any of that so they will openly demand that police officers and others just doing their duty, are assaulted. In other words when individuals have removed critical thinking – the ‘OD’ bit of OODA, then the organsations and institutions they work for will do the same.

“Zero tolerance” is often code for “zero thinking”

Here is the institutional trick that keeps repeating.

A difficult issue arises. It might be safeguarding, workplace conduct, discrimination, policing, clinical governance, you name it.

Instead of careful, lawful, proportionate decision-making, the leadership reaches for “zero tolerance” because it signals moral seriousness and reduces the need for messy reasoning. (“We’re doing something!”)

But the moment you replace judgement with slogan, you create a lethal incentive: anyone who points out flaws becomes the problem.

The person raising risks is treated as obstructive. The person asking for evidence is treated as disloyal. The person warning about legality is treated as “not aligned with values”.

This is how you get organisations punishing the very behaviour that executive contracts explicitly demand: risk identification, governance, and duty of candour.

And yes, this ends up in employment tribunals and public scandal, because reality is not impressed by your internal comms strategy.

From government to policing to the NHS: the same cultural rot

Consider policing: West Midlands Police was placed into “special measures” in late 2023 amid serious concerns about performance and protection of vulnerable people. (The Guardian)

Or take basic competence: the ICO reprimanded West Midlands Police in 2024 for a data protection failure that led to inaccurate records and operational errors—including officers attending the wrong address in safeguarding contexts. (ICO)

Whilst we are on West Midland’s Police, they are now in trouble because Chief Constable Guildford has lied to MPs about the decision making process used to ban Israeli football fans from Birmingham last year. Not a single member of his leadership team called him out for this, indeed, in the Parliamentary committee they all nodded along like donkeys.

Different domain, same underlying failure: systems that punish challenge and reward conformity will eventually make catastrophic mistakes and then spend their energy managing reputational fallout rather than fixing the root cause.

In the NHS, we see similar dynamics in bitter, public cases where governance, policy, and rights collide. NHS Fife’s high-profile legal dispute around single-sex changing facilities has involved suspensions, major legal spend, and continuing controversy. Whatever your view of the underlying issue, it demonstrates something organisations hate admitting: when leadership treats dissent as misconduct, disputes escalate, trust collapses, and everyone loses. (The Guardian)

And in central government departments, the defensive posture can become grotesque: for example, reporting that the DWP spent significant sums attempting to block release of a safeguarding review linked to a disabled man’s death. (The Guardian)

These are not isolated “bad apples”. They are what you get when the dominant skill in leadership is navigating internal politics rather than testing reality.

So why is talent so thin at the top?

Because we spent years selecting against it.

Real talent is not just IQ or a fancy CV. In leadership, talent is the capacity to do the unfashionable things:

ask “what happens next?”
say “this will backfire”
insist on evidence
identify legal risk
tolerate social discomfort
disagree without personalising
hold a line against the mob and against the cowardice of colleagues

But those traits are precisely what modern institutional cultures train out of people.

If your promotion system rewards “smoothness” and punishes friction, you will end up with leaders who are smooth, right up until the moment the building catches fire. Then, suddenly, nobody can find the person who knows where the exits are.

How do we fix it?

It’s embarrassingly simple, though not easy.

Stop punishing people for asking the difficult questions. Formally, socially, culturally.

Concretely:

Make dissent a job requirement.
Every senior team should have an explicit “red team” function: someone tasked with breaking the plan before the public does.
Reward risk-spotting.
Track how often staff identify problems early. Promote the people who prevent disasters, not just those who “deliver” glossy launches.
Run pre-mortems, not post-mortems.
Before launching policy, force the team to write the headlines for its failure. Then address the failure modes before you commit.
Separate loyalty from competence.
Loyalty to a mission is fine. Loyalty to a person is poison. If a leader can’t tolerate challenge, they are unfit to lead.
Protect internal speech.
Not “safe spaces”. Real safety: the ability to say, “This is unlawful / unworkable / dangerous,” without career death.

And yes, this means asking the questions that make polite people squirm. Questions like:

Are you really going to decline to investigate industrial-scale child sexual abuse because you fear the optics more than you fear failing the vulnerable?

If that question makes your leadership team uncomfortable, good. Discomfort is often the first sign you’re finally approaching the truth.

Because the alternative is what we have now: policy made by performance, leadership by compliance, and a country governed through the humiliating ritual of the U-turn.

This article (The Cult of the U-Turn: Why Our Leaders Don’t Think Before They Leap) was created and published by C.J. Strachan and is republished here under “Fair Use”

••••

The Liberty Beacon Project is now expanding at a near exponential rate, and for this we are grateful and excited! But we must also be practical. For 7 years we have not asked for any donations, and have built this project with our own funds as we grew. We are now experiencing ever increasing growing pains due to the large number of websites and projects we represent. So we have just installed donation buttons on our websites and ask that you consider this when you visit them. Nothing is too small. We thank you for all your support and your considerations … (TLB)

••••

Comment Policy: As a privately owned web site, we reserve the right to remove comments that contain spam, advertising, vulgarity, threats of violence, racism, or personal/abusive attacks on other users. This also applies to trolling, the use of more than one alias, or just intentional mischief. Enforcement of this policy is at the discretion of this websites administrators. Repeat offenders may be blocked or permanently banned without prior warning.

••••

Disclaimer: TLB websites contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, health, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.

••••

Disclaimer: The information and opinions shared are for informational purposes only including, but not limited to, text, graphics, images and other material are not intended as medical advice or instruction. Nothing mentioned is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The Liberty Beacon Project.